Windows assembly heap and stack?

Question

OS: Windows 7 32bit

So in like c++ one has a heap and a stack. But i\'ve been starting on some assembly learning lately and haven\'t seen anything of the sort, only

Answer 1

The stack is maintained mostly by the CPU (PUSH/POP/CALL/RET commands); the heap is purely an OS/run-time library feature. Therefore stack access is natural in assembly. For heap access you just call the relevant APIs from your assembly code (HeapAlloc/HeapFree, or from some other library). Unlike stack, there are no low-level primitives in the assembly language for heap memory management.

You don't have to worry about stack size on Windows. As you use up more and more of it, it will grow transparently. In low-level terms, Windows sets up a guard memory page below the stack bottom (assuming stack grows down). When your stack reaches the guard page, an access violation exception is generated in the CPU. Windows kernel would catch it, notice the situation and grow the stack.